Di Sciullo Anna Maria, Boeckx Cedric (Editors). The Biolinguistic Enterprise: New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty (Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics)

Oxford University Press. 2011. — 559 p. — ISBN: 0199553270.This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity the "evo-devo revolution" which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.Introduction: Contours of the Biolinguistic Research Agenda 1
Evolution
The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Development
Some Reflections on Darwin’s Problem in the Context of Cartesian Biolinguistics
Syntax Facit Saltum Redux: Biolinguistics and the Leap to Syntax
A Geneticist’s Dream, a Linguist’s Nightmare: The Case of FOXP2
Biolinguistic Investigations: Genetics and Dynamics
Deep Homology in the Biology and Evolution of Language
Variation
The Three Design Factors in Evolution and Variation
Three Factors in Language Variation
Approaching Parameters from Below
(Bio)linguistic Variation: Have/be Alternations in the Present Perfect
The Biolinguistic Program and Historical Reconstruction
A Biolinguistic Approach to Variation
Computation
Antisymmetry and the Lexicon
What Kind of Computing Device is the Human Language Faculty?
Clauses, Propositions, and Phases
Reflections on the Optimal Solution: On the Syntactic Representation of Indexicality
Emergence of a Systemic Semantics through Minimal and Underspecified Codes
Bridging the Gap between Brain and Syntax: A Case for a Role of the Phonological Loop
All You Need is Merge: Biology, Computation, and Language from the Bottom Up